Guwahati – The oldest missionary in northeast India breathed his last in the early hours of Thursday, 23 June at Salesian Provincial House Guwahati. He was 98 years old.

“The Salesian province of Guwahati deeply mourns the passing away of Fr Porcu Mario on June 23, 2016 at 1.40 am,” announced Guwahati provincial Fr V.M. Thomas in a pre-dawn Whatsapp message to confreres.

“He had a peaceful and serene death surrounded by his confreres,” the provincial stated.

The funeral Mass is scheduled to be held on Friday 24 th June at 2.00 pm at St Joseph’s Co-Cathedral adjacent to Salesian provincial house Guwahati followed by funeral rites and burial at Christian Cemetery, Uzan Bazaar, Guwahati.

Born on 21 st May 1918 at Cagliari in Italy, Fr Mario, who spent 75 years in India marked 51st year of becoming a naturalized Indian citizen by casting his vote at the Assam Assembly elections, 11 April 2016.

Fr Mario became an Indian citizen at a time when Indian government was expelling foreign missionaries from the northeastern state of Assam, recalled Fr. Thomas, who is the president of the Conference of Religious India and head of Guwahati Salesian province.

Fr Mario was then the rector of Don Bosco School in Shillong, a prestigious institution in northeastern India.

The Indian government records estimated that the country had some 5,000 foreign missionaries during mid-1960s.

The Home Minister of then Congress-led Central government in Assam is claimed to have said, “Foreign missionaries already in India will be allowed to stay so long as we don’t have many things against them.”

Fr Mario was one such “harmless missionary” who became an Indian citizen in 1965.

A pioneer missionary in the Khasi and Garo Hills of Meghalaya, as well as in the Assam plains and neighboring Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, Fr Mario was a frontier missionary in several parts of the region known as seven sisters.

Scores of missionaries expelled from Assam went to neighboring states of West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh as well as southern India.

Church records of 1960s reveal there were 764,553 Christians in Assam with 299 foreign missionaries working in their midst. The expulsion order accordingly hit at least, a hundred Catholic missionaries, including Italian Salesian Bishop Orestes Marengo of Tezpur in Upper

Assam and three of his priests whose residential permits expired in September 1968.

A pioneer of vocational training in Assam, Fr Mario was present last month (30th May 2016) at the inauguration of a 48-year- old vocational/skill training school in Guwahati which geared up to be an electronic manufacturing hub in the gateway city of northeastern India at Maligaon.

Fr Mario established the pioneer manufacturing institution Don Bosco Technical School (DBTS), Maligaon in 1968 as a non formal technical institute managed by Don Bosco Educational Society Guwahati “to impart technical education and skilling of the marginalized and poor rural youth including school drop-outs of Assam and adjoining north eastern states of India.”

The Institution trained some 3,000 marginalized youth over the last three years and more than 80 per cent of them have been happily placed.”